The Queer Poetics of Hester Pulter's Poem, “Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hester Pulter's poem about a young woman's suicide after the death of her lover in battle has been described by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall and a representation of an event that “sounds like a cross between melodrama and a news bulletin”. Drawing on Hilary Maddicott's work on the death of Margaret Lemon in Oxford, this article highlights a number of contemporary literary and newsbook sources that describe such a suicide. Pulter's poem, rather than condemning its young woman for her actions (as the parliamentarian newsbooks condemn Lemon for hers), unconventionally celebrates its subject's self-destruction by comparing her to a list of heroic lovers from the classical past. This process of comparison builds through the poem, as the young woman and her soldier are repeatedly compared to each other, to their king, to other famous loving couples and, implicitly, to Christ, until the repeated layering of different gendered characteristics on to their literary bodies ultimately disrupts binary significations. That is, in the poem, the intensive comparison of hetero-earthly love both to Christ's love and to mythological and historical instances of loving sacrifice comes to destabilize gender positions and to make a space for queer desire.